Friday, January 11, 2019

When I tell people - non-scientists - that I am a marine geophysicist, most of them ask me about whales. I study the ocean floor, not the life within the ocean, but I think people have heard of a marine biologist, and often have never come across a geophysicist, let alone one who works at sea. So, I spend a lot of time explaining that whales are beautiful, but I don't study whales. Once, I struggled to explain my research in French, to someone who kept me busy with questions for over an hour - but the next time we met, she asked me how the whale research was going! So, hilariously, when asked to perform at a science-themed storytelling event, I've opted to share a story about whales in a tale about when
marine geophysics goes wrong. You can catch me next Monday, at the Burdock (1184 Bloor Street) for The Story Collider, a science storytelling event series and podcast, where people tell personal stories about science. You can reserve your ticket
here. The stories might begin at 7:30 but seating is limited, so unless
you're happier standing (closer to the bar), you'll want to arrive by
7:00.

Me (left), the marine geophysicist, in the field and some of my sciart
about the exploration of space: my linocut portrait of astronaut
Mae Jemison (above) and mathematician and Space Race aeronautical
engineer Mary Golda Ross (below)

Last fall, I gave a talk about my experience as an astronaut candidate for the Canadian Space Agency for Science Literacy Week. Since astronauts are both scientists and science communicators, I combined an introduction to my research with my science-art, since I usually use the medium of fine art to communicate science these days. This was the first time I had an opportunity to combine these two very different pursuits in one talk! I also, of course, spoke about the extraordinary experience of the astronaut selection process and getting the opportunity to go the the Astronaut Assessment Centre. I have since given a version of this talk to a troupe of boy scouts and visiting girl scouts. I will be giving this talk two more times this year at Toronto Public Libraries. You can catch me:

Sunday, December 30, 2018

This year started with the end of our tenure running the Toronto Etsy Street Team gallery. Though this meant a great deal less time curating shows, I did make a move to show my art more in gallery shows, and sell through galleries and shops and less selling in person. Early in the year, I decided I would not participate in the One of a Kind Christmas Show. Selling art in person is tough to do; it's hard on your body to stand for long hours, fine art can be a harder sell than handmade goods which serve more than just an aesthetic purpose, and retailing anything can be gruelling - perhaps more so if it is your own creation. But, I am quite pleased that I did participate in a large number of artshows, a sold art in a variety of cities this year.

The first show for me this year was The Tarot Lovers: Works of Heart exhibition, which showed (and sold) at the Wellington County Museum and Archives. Curated by Shelley Carter, this show is one in a series she has organized with themes based on Tarot cards. I enjoyed the challenge of mixing those concepts with my ongoing works about the history of science, as an excuse to highlight the loving partnership of Antoine Lavoisier (26 August 1743 – 8 May 1794) and his wife Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier (20 January 1758 – 10 February 1836). Lavoisier is often referred to as the 'father' of modern chemistry, without any reference to his wife, and yet, as their official illustrator, she shows herself participating in his experiments and her skills as technical scientific translator allowed him to be up-to-date with chemistry across the Channel.

The works, along with my previously exhibited 'Imaginary Menagerie' prints were exhibited at Balzac's upstairs gallery for the Curious Fauna show in the fall, and I got my very own wunderkammer of beautiful and very varied artist-made matchboxes on the theme of cabinets of curiosities. This delightful project was curated and created by Hearyung Kim and Natalie Draz (whom I know from PROOF Studio Gallery).

In March I took part in Graven Feather's 'What the Fukushini' exhibit, submitting a version of my pink fairy armadillo linocut with collaged washi papers. This show, in partnership with The Paper Place, had artists make works on or with a specific washi paper. There was a great and delightful variety of works.

Pink fairy armadillo, 11" x 13",

multimedia by Ele Willoughby, 2018 (sold)

The most significant creation of new work for an exhibit was my five new portraits of Canadian women in STEM which were part of Curiosty Collider's show Interstitial: Science Innovations by Canadian Women, along with two other artists, this June in Vancouver! Interstitial was curated by Larissa Blokhuis, who makes gorgeous natural history inspired works, mainly in glass. I had previously made Ursula Franklin's portrait for the Phylo Project from Dave Ng and the Advanced Molecular Biology Laboratory (the science education facility within the Michael Smith Laboratories, UBC): a trading card game about Women in Science and Engineering! I added geologist Alice Wilson, physicist Harriet Brooks, computer scientist Trixie Worsley, medical researcher and biochemist Maud Menten and geneticist and Down syndrome expert Irene Ayako Uchida. Of these new five, I had only previously known Menten, despite having worked at the Geological Survey of Canada (like Wilson), being an alumni of U of T where Worsley had taught physics and computing and being a physicist by training (like Brooks). I was very glad to become involved with a great science/art organization and take part in this exhibit. Some artwork sold and many others in these editions have since - and it caused me to do some research specically on the history of Canadian women in STEM. This was revealing in and of itself, and I also gained some useful insights into how to find great stories about underappreciated women scientists.

I made 'Redbud and the Bees' for Creature Conserve a non-profit outreach organization which brings artists and scientists together to "foster sustained and informed support for animal conservation," and their show Urban Wildlife: Learning to Co-exist. I remembered the urbanredbud citizen science project here in Toronto. Local U of T doctoral candidate Charlotte de Keyzer is working with the public to gather data on flowering times of Eastern redbud trees (Cercis canadensis) and their pollinators using bee nest boxes and traps. She made the suggestion of highlighting how the redbuds are moving into Toronto due to climate change and gardiners, and though popular with our local bees, they also attract a less popular new species the Eastern carpenter bee, who drill holes in wood to build nests. (Because the world is very small, it turns out de Keyser is the sister-in-law of my friend Laura Watt who you may know from Cubits). This show was curated by Creature Conserve founder, artist and scientist Lucy Spelman. It has been shown at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in July, and ArtProv Gallery in Rhode Island in September. This year, the exhibit will travel to other galleries in the US. Stay tuned for more details and chances to see these works!

This August, the Ontario Science Centre (OSC) staged an exhibit called 'Quantum' about the history of quatum mechanics. My friends at The Maker Bean (where you can now find my art, at both their Bloor and Dufferin and OSC locations) asked if I had an artwork about quatum mechanics. Indeed I do! So my portraits of physicists Bohr, Meitner, Roentgen, Wu and Curie, as well as Schroedinger's Cat, have all been on display at the OSC since then!

This October, I was invited to give a talk as part of Science Literacy Week about my experience being an astronaut candidate for the Canadian Space Agency. Since astronauts are both scientists and science communicators, I took this as an opportunity to talk about both my research and sciart, together for the first time. I spoke at an event called "Space Mythbusters" at Gerstein Library along with a couple of other scientists. I told them what the astronaut selection process was really like and a bit about the mission that Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques has now begun, onboard the International Space Station. I also gave a version of this talk to a Boy Scout troup and am planning to do so at a couple of Toronto Public Libraries in 2019. Jesse Hildebrand spearheads Science Literacy Week, and he invited me to submit a proposal for Story Collider, a science-themed storyteller series and podcast. He hosts the Toronto series along with Misha Gajewski. So, I'm going to be doing that too, very early in the new year! Catch me on January 14th.

Eastern carpenter bee multimedia (sold)

Once again, I participated in Graven Feather's In the Round Show, this year hosted at PROOF Studio Gallery in the Distillery. I made a couple of round multimedia works based on my new bee and redbud lino blocks and one on the pink fairy armadillo. Like other years, I also participated in and helped organize the Toronto Etsy Street Team shows, including the Summer Market (or, this year, our first Etsy: Made in Canada Spring Show), Etsy: Made in Canada in September and our TEST Christmas Market, less than a week ago. I also participated in Peggy Muddles' Scienterrific Pop-up at Tosca Terran's new Co:Lab space - in the same gallery where we had our year-long TEST Gallery pop-up! Likewise, I participated in Graven Feather's Holiday Market too. I was very pleased to also send off a selection of women scientist prints to Anthology boutique in Madison, Wisconsin.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal, linocut, 12" x 12" by Ele Willoughby, 2018

As
well as all these shows and works created with specific shows in mind, I
also added to my on-going collection of scientist portraits with
neuroscientist and artist in his own right, Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852 - 1934), 17th century scientist and scifi author Margaret Cavendish, ancient Egyptian court physician Merit Ptah (arguably the earliest recorded woman in science), pharmaceutical chemist Alice Ball (who made the first effective treatment for leprosy), mathematician and Space Race engineer Mary Golda Ross, and mathematician Emmy Noether.
All of these involved research and writing on my part too. I also
managed to complete my long-awaited chair reuphostery personal project,
with involved printmaking, patchwork, applique and embroidery.

On
a personal front, we managed to also sneak in trips to Sault Ste Marie
for my family reunion and out to New Brunswick to see my husband's
family. Amazingly, our - now five year old son - has been raised to be a
good little traveller, and we managed to do this by car! My husband has
some new, hard-won job security. Our son started French immersion in
senior kindergarter this year. All of this is good.

When
I looked back I see that in fact, a lot happened this year, and while
it sort of feels sometimes that I have never accomplished enough, I have
done rather a lot. I know that this year will bring more art shows,
already in the planning and several more speaking engagements. I have
several collections I am continuing to build and I would like to do more
varied multimedia work. It isn't always straightforward to navigate a
path as self-employed modern day Renaissance woman, but I think (I hope)
that I'm on the right patch to carve out my own place at the
intersection of art and science.

Tuesday, October 9, 2018

The earliest recorded woman in science was a woman of colour and one of the earliest known person in STEM at all. Merit Ptah
("beloved of [the god] Ptah") lived circa 2700 BCE and was chief
physician of the pharoah's court, implying not only that she was
recognized as a doctor, who attended the pharoah, but that she trained
and supervised other doctors, during the Second or Third Dynasty of
Ancient Egypt.

Hypatia, the first recorded female mathematician lived in the 3rd century AD in Alexandria, Egypt, which was part of the
Roman Empire. She was born at some time between about 350 and 370 and
died in 415 C.E. She was the head of the Platonist school, where she
taught philosophy, astronomy and mathematics. She believed in empiricism
and natural law. She was the last librarian of the famed Library of
Alexandria in the Museum of Alexandria, largest and most significant
library of the ancient world. She was the daughter of a famous
mathematician, Theon Alexandricus (ca. 335–405), with whom she worked
and published edited versions of Classical texts in mathematics. She
also pursued her education in Athens and Italy before returning to
Alexandria and becoming the head of the Platonist school. It is known that she wrote commentaries on 13-volume Arithmetica by
Diophantus, the Conics of Apollonius, and edited Ptolemy's Almagest and
on Euclid's Elements. She charted heavenly bodies. She built and instructed her pupils in the
design and use of the astrolabe, and likely made improvements to it.

Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717), was the leading
entomologist of her day, traveller and scientific illustrator. She is
shown complete with pomegranate branch and the life cycle of a morpho butterfly
from caterpillar, to chrysalis in its cocoon to butterfly, inspired by
her famous work 'Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium' - a process she
discovered then carefully documented and explained.

German-born Caroline Herschel
(1750 – 1848), while overshadowed by her brother William
(who discovered Uranus, amongst his other astronomical
accomplishments), was a real pioneer as a woman in astronomy and made
her own important contributions. In fact, she became the first salaried
female scientist, when King George III hired her to assist her brother,
at a time when there were few professional scientists anywhere. Hers was
a real life sort of scientific Cinderella story; deemed
unmarriageable, since a childhood bout of typhus stunted her growth, her
mother thought she should train to be a servant but William managed to
rescue his younger sister from their mother's clutches, under the
pretext that she might have the voice to be a solo singer in Handel's
oratorios, as she too was a natural musician. Of course, he also wanted a
woman to manage his bachelor household. Meanwhile, he developed a real
passion for astronomy and soon, so did his sister. She discovered 11
nebulae (2 of which turned out to be galaxies) which
were previously unknown! She also found 8 or 9 comets, as well as making
and sharing observations of comets discovered by others. She worked to
complete and publish her brother's star charts after his death.

Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier (1758 – 1836) was the wife of Antoine Lavoisier, who is often referred to as the 'father' of modern chemistry,
without any reference to his wife. Marie-Anne became interested in her husband's scientific pursuits and soon
joined him in the lab. She received formal training in the field from
his friends and colleagues Jean Baptiste Michel Bucquet
and Philippe Gingembre. Marie-Anne also famously hosted scientific salons with luminaries
of the day and was taught. Jacques Louis David painted his Portrait of Anoine-Laurent Lavoisier and
his wife in 1788. He also trained Marie-Anne Paulze in drawing and
engraving, allowing her to accurately illustrate their experiements. And
she most definitely appears in her own drawings and engravings
documenting their work.

Mary Anning
(1799 – 1847) was the wrong class, the wrong
sex and even the wrong religious denomination to gain the education,
opportunity to work and communicate her results or to garner any respect
as a pioneering paleontologist. Further, during her lifetime most
people in Britain and elsewhere thought the Earth was a mere few
thousand years old, based on a very literal interpretation of the Bible
and found the idea of extinction did not fit in with the story of
creation. Yet, her fossil discoveries, meticulous collection,
documentation and independent work to fully understand the anatomy of
the amazing Jurassic creatures she encountered in famed Blue Lias cliffs
of Lyme Regis, Dorset, England, were so undeniable that she gained the
recognition, admiration and respect of the paleontologists of the day.
She made her first significant find, the first ichthyosaur skeleton to
be correctly identified, with her brother Joseph when she was only 12
years old. Her research showed that belemnite fossils contained
fossilised ink sacs
like those of modern cephalopods. She was also the first to recognize
that coprolites, known as bezoar stones at the time, were fossilised...
well, animal droppings (feces). While this sounds distinctly
unglamorous, the study of coprolites pioneered by Anning and Buckland
were vital to understanding ancient ecosystems. Her friend Henry De la
Beche painted the first widely circulated representation of a
prehistoric (deep time) scene, based on her finds, and he sold prints to
benefit her financially.

Anna Atkins (1799-1871), née Children, was an English botanist and photographer. She is the first person to have illustrated a book using photographs, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions in October 1843. Note that: not the first woman, the first person.
She lived at a time when it was possible to be a self-trained
scientist, especially if you were middle or upper class and received an
education and the financial freedom to devote your time to pursue your
subject. She was raised and instructed by her father, a
naturalist, and her social circle included those who were developing (no
pun intended) the latest, brand new photographic technology. So, she
was at the right place at the right time. But that doesn't take away
from the fact that she had the knowledge, skill, insight and ability to
immediately see the utility of the method for descriptive science and to
document a specific field of sub-field of botany, with her collection
of the algae (seaweeds) of Britain. I think this should be understood as
equivalent to a modern-day scientist keeping abreast of other fields of
study and rapidly mastering a new high-tech tool to apply it to her
field. Even William Henry Fox Talbot, who who invented the salted paper
and calotype processes, precursors to modern photographic methods, was
not able to publish The Pencil of Nature the first commercially printed photographic book, until eight months after she produced Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions.

Today is named in honour of Countess, Lady Ada Lovelace (1815-1852), who published the first
computer program. She worked together with Charles Babbage, the inventor
of the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine (the first -
analogue! - computers), correcting his notes on how to calculate
Bernoulli Numbers with the Analytical Engine. More importantly, she (a
great communicator, daughter of mad, bad and dangerous to know poet Lord
Byron) was able to understand and explain the workings of the
analytical engine and the potential of computing machines. Her comments
seem visionary to the modern reader. Babbage called her the Enchantress
of Numbers.

Founder of modern nursing, social reformer, statistician, data
visualization innovator and writer Florence Nightingale (1820 –
1910) earned the nickname "The Lady with the Lamp" during the Crimean War,
from a phrase used by The Times, describing her as a “ministering angel”
making her solitary rounds of the hospital at night with “a little lamp
in her hand”. Behind Nightingale is her own ‘Diagram of Causes of Mortality in the
Army in the East’ plotted as a polar area diagram – her own statistical
and data visualization innovation, sometimes called a Nightingale Rose
Diagram. It illustrates the causes of death in the military hospital she
managed during the Crimean War. When she researched
the causes of mortality, looking back at the data, she saw clearly that
the lack of hygiene was a far greater risk to soldiers’ lives than being
wounded. Her statistics and clear data visualization saved lives.

Great Russian mathematician and writer, Sofia Vasilyevna Kovalevski
(1850-1891), is also known as Sofie
or Sonya, her last name has been transliterated from the Cyrillic Со́фья
Васи́льевна Ковале́вска in a variety of ways, including Kovalevskaya
and Kowalevski. Sofia's contributions to analysis, differential
equations and mechanics include the Cauchy-Kovalevski theorem and the
famed Kovalevski top (well, famed in certain circles, no pun intended).
We now know there are only three fully integrable cases of rigid body
motion and her solution ranks with those of mathematical luminaries
Euler and Lagrange.
She was the first woman appointed to a full professorship in Northern
Europe or to serve as editor of a major scientific journal. She is also
remembered for her contributions to Russian literature. All of this
despite living when women were still barred from attending university.
Her accomplishments were tremendous in her short but astonishing life.

My portrait of Marie Skłodowska-Curie
(1867 – 1934) shows the famous
Polish-born, naturalized-French physicist and chemist at work in her
lab. The contents of her lab glassware appropriately glow-in-the-dark!
She was one of the pioneers who helped explain radioactivity, a term she
coined. She was the one who first developed a means of isolating
radioactive isotopes and discovered not one, but two new elements:
polonium (named for her native country) and radium. She also pioneered
radioactive medicine, proposing the treatment of tumors with
radioactivity. She founded medical research centres, the Curie
Institutes in Paris and Warsaw which are still active today. She created
the first field radiology centres during World War I. Marie Curie was
the first woman to win a Nobel prize, the only woman to
ever win TWO Nobel prizes, and the only person ever to win in two
different sciences: physics and chemistry!

Henrietta Swan Leavitt (1868- 1921) was an American astronomer. In her
day, women scientists were regularly hired to do menial chores. She was
hired to count images on photographic plates as a "computer". In
studying these plates, in 1908 she was able to deduce a ground-breaking theory, which allowed Hubble's later insight about the age and expansion of the universe. Her period-luminosity relation for Cepheid variable stars radically changed modern astronomy, an accomplishment for which she received little recognition during her lifetime.

Canadian medical researcher Maud Menten
(1870-1960) has been called the "grandmother of biochemistry" and "a
radical feminist 1920s flapper," and a "petite dynamo." Not only was
she an author of Michaelis-Menten equation for enzyme kinetics (like
the plot in indigo in my portrait), she invented the azo-dye coupling
for alkaline phosphatase, the first example of enzyme histochemistry,
still used in histochemistry imaging of tissues today (which inspired
the histology background of the portrait), and she also performed the
first electrophoretic separation of blood haemoglobin in 1944!

Physicist Harriet Brooks
(1876 - 1933) shows her and her discovery of atomic recoil. Brooks
also discovered Radon and measured its atomic mass and half-life. Her
graduate supervisor and future Nobel laureate Ernest Rutherford also
credited her with first recognizing that radioactive elements could
undergo chains of transmutations into a series of new elements. He
stated that she was second only to Marie Curie in her capacity for and
ability as a radioactivity researcher. During her extraordinary 6 year
career in physics she worked with 3 Nobel laureates (Rutherford,
Thomson and Curie) and made these fundamental contributions to the new
field of nuclear physics!

Physicist Lise Meitner (1878 – 1968) was the first person to provide a theoretical explanation for nuclear
fission and was an integral member of the experimental team as well (she collaborated with ollaborated with chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Straßmann),
though her gender and her heritage interfered with her being properly
acknowledged in late 30s Germany. Only Hahn was awarded the Nobel for
this work. She received the Max Planck Medal of the German Physics
Society in 1949.
Meitner was nominated to receive the Nobel prize three times. In 1966
Hahn, Fritz Straßmann and Meitner together were awarded the Enrico Fermi
Award. In 1997, the element 109 was named meitnerium in her honour.
Today the Hahn-Meitner Institut in Berlin, craters on the Moon and on
Venus, and a main-belt asteroid are all named in her honour.

Geologist and paleontologist Alice Wilson
(1881-1964) mapped the entire Ottawa-St Larence Valley region by
herself, since she was barred from doing fieldwork with men, was the
first female Canadian geologist, despite ill-health and a frail
constitution. Her research interests focused
on fossil invertebrates from the Paleozoic era (252–541 million years
ago) from across Canada, and from the Ordovician era (444–485 million
years ago) in her own backyard in Ontario and Quebec as well as
Ordovician fauna from the Rockies and Arctic. She studied stratigraphy
in Ontario and Quebec. Over the course of 50 years, she became an
authority on fossils and rocks of the Ottawa - St. Lawrence Valley, as a
direct response to the sexist limitations placed upon her.

Inge Lehmann (1888-1993) was a pioneer woman in science, a
brilliant seismologist and lived to be 104. In 1936 she wrote an
earth-shattering paper, with an astonishingly succinct title: P' in
which she laid out her arguments supporting her discovery of the inner core of the earth.
She later also discovered a discontinuity in the mantle (confusingly
called the Lehmann discontinuity). When she received the Bowie medal in
1971 (she was the first woman to
receive the highest honour of the American Geophysical Union), her
citation noted that the "Lehmann discontinuity was discovered through
exacting scrutiny of seismic records by a master of a black art for
which no amount of computerization is likely to be a complete
substitute..."

Alice Augusta Ball
(1892 - 1916) was a chemist who discovered the first effective
treatment for leprosy (or Hansen's disease) a disfiguring disease which
has afflicted people for millenia. Physician Dr. Harry T. Hollmann of
the Kalihi Hospital in Hawai'i and
acting director of the Kalihi leprosy clinic, was unsatisfied with using
chaulmoogra oil in its natural form to treat leprosy patients and
wanted to isolate the active ingredients. He recruited the graduate
student Ball to help. Within a year, she was able to do what chemists
and pharmacologists had been unable to do for centuries. She not only
isolated the active ingredients but convert them to a form which could
be circulated in the body. My print shows how she formed the ethyl ester
of chaulmoogric acid (the acid plus alcohol produces the ethyl ester
with water).

Alice Ball, 11" x 14", linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2018, shows the chemist, branches of the chaulmoogra tree and
how she formed the ethyl ester of chaulmoogric acid (the acid plus alcohol produces the ethyl ester with water)

Mary Golda Ross (1908-2008) was a mathematician, aeronautical engineer, philanthropist and Cherokee “hidden figure” of the space race. Lockheed Martin hired her as mathematician in 1942, troubleshooting the
P-38 Lighting fighter plane (as shown). She knew already that her
interest was in interplanetary flight, but didn’t mention it in 1942 for
fear that her credibility would be questioned, but she was indeed
farsighted. After the war Lockheed Martin sent her to UCLA to study
engineering and celestial mechanics. She was one of the 40 engineers
selected to start Skunk Works, their Advanced Development Program, an
in-house top-secret think tank. She was the only woman and only
Indigenous person and much of her work there remains classified! It
included preliminary design concepts for interplanetary travel, crewed
and uncrewed space flights and the earliest plans for orbiting
satellites. She worked on the Agena rocket, so important to the Apollo
moon mission (shown) and was an author of the NASA Flight Handbook Vol.
III about flight to Mars and Venus.

Physicist Chien-Shiung Wu
(1912-1997, Chinese-born American physicist, whose nicknames included
the “First Lady of Physics”, “Chinese Marie Curie,” and “Madame Wu”)
came up with a truly beautiful experiment to test whether the weak force
conserves parity. For their theoretical work on the question of parity in the physics of
subatomic particles, Lee and Yang were quickly awarded the Nobel Prize
for Physics in 1957; the Nobel committee neglected to include Wu.

Hedy Lamarr
(1914 – 2000), best known as a star of Hollywood's Golden Age was born
Hedwig Keisler, escaped Austria during WWII and her arms-dealer husband
and put her inside knowledge to work for the Allied forces. She knew
that torpedoes were guided by radio signals, of a single
frequency, which were vulnerable to interference or "jamming". She had
the idea that if multiple frequencies were employed, like a radio
station which varied its channel unpredictably, it would not be possible
for the enemy to find and interfere with the signal. This way the
signal could be encoded across a broad spectrum. She met her neighbour,
the avant-guard musician and composer George Antheil at a party.
Together they developed Hedy's frequency-hopping idea, encorporating
George's technology for synchronizing pianolas, and on the 11th of
August, 1942, US Patent Number 2,292,387 for the "Secret Communications
System." Lamarr's and Antheil's frequency-hopping idea serves as a basis
for
modern spread-spectrum communication technology, such as Bluetooth,
COFDM (used in Wi-Fi network connections), CDMA (used in some cordless
and wireless telephones) and 4G LTE communications. You are probably
using a device right now which relies on these ideas.

Irene Ayako Uchida
(1917-2013) was a geneticist and cytologist who discovered the risk
posed to future offspring due to abdominal x-rays on their pregnant
mothers. She was a world expert in Down syndrome, President of the
American Society of Human Genetics, served on the Science Council of
Canada, received honourary degrees from McMaster and Western
universities, was named Woman of the Century 1867-1967 by the National
Council of Jewish Women, in Manitoba, an Officer of the Order of Canada,
had a lifelong love of language and grammar, and a wry sense of humour.

Irene Ayako Uchida, Linocut, 9.25" x 12.5", 2018 by Ele Willoughby
My
linocut portrait of Canadian geneticist Irene Ayako Uchida (1917-2013)
is hand printed on 9.25" x 12.5" Japanese kozo (or mulberry) paper.
Uchida is shown surrounded by chromosones, with anomalies (shown with
pink arrows) due to radiation exposure, based on one of her research
papers. A strand of DNA is hidden in the image (as her watchband).

American geologist and oceanographic cartographer Marie Tharp
(1920-2006), made pioneering, thorough and complete ocean floor maps
made with her partner in science Bruce Heezen which revealed the
Mid-Atlantic
Ridge. The mid-ocean ridge itself, based on their 1957 physiographic
map, is illustrated behind her, along with the sort of echo sounder or
precision depth recorder tracks she used, in front of her. This work
was integral to the Plate Tectonics revolution in earth science.

Beatrice "Trixie" Helen Worsley
(1921-1972) is believed to have earned the very first doctorate in
computer science, supervised by Douglas Hartree and Alan Turing at
Cambridge, set the WWII Wrens' record for time at sea, at 150 days, and
was the first female computer scientist in Canada.

Trixie Worsley, linocut 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2018

Ursula Franklin (1921 – 2016) represented not only excellence in science and engineering, but she was a great,
perhaps even visionary, thinker on the very role of technology in our
society, as well as a fearless and tireless advocate for women in STEM,
peace and social justice. Her research interests and achievements were
clearly guided by her principles, including gathering evidence of the
harmful health effects of radiation from atmospheric testing of nuclear
weapons to or her work on the political and societal impacts of support
of the technologies and their use. She was also a pioneer in archeometry: the application of material science to archeology.

Astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell (born 1943) was just a graduate student in 1967 when she discovered the first radio pulsar
(or pulsating star), a highly magnetized, rotating neutron star that
emits a beam of electromagnetic radiation. This radiation (light in the
radio frequency band) can only be observed when the star is point
towards us; so, like the light from a distant lighthouse, it appears to
pulse at a precise frequency. The 1968 paper announcing this discovery in Nature has five authors,
lead by Hewish, followed by Jocelyn Bell. In 1974, Hewish won the Nobel
Prize for this discovery, along with fellow radioastronomer Martin
Ryle). Jocelyn Bell was not included as it was assumed that the "senior
man" was responsible for the work. Jocelyn Bell Burnell has gone one to a very distinguished career in
astrophysics. She became the first female president of the Institude of
Physics and of the Royal Society of Edinburg. She helped set up the
Athena Swan programme to support UK women in science. In 2018 she was
awarded the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for her
discovery of pulsars and lifetime of leadership in science. She is
donating the award money to the Institute of Physics for PhD scolarships
for underrepresented people including women, ethnic minorities and
refugee students in physics!

Mae Carol Jemison
(born October 17, 1956) is a physician who became the first African
American woman to travel in space when she went into orbit aboard the
Space Shuttle Endeavour for NASA, on September 12, 1992. She also has a
B.S. in chemical engineering, served in the Peace Corps, is a dancer and
choreographer, formed and runs her own company researching the
application of technology to daily life, and even appeared on Star Trek:
The Next Generation.

Mae Jemison, linocut on Japanese kozo paper, 9.25" by 12.5" (23.5 cm by 32 cm) in an edition of eight by Ele Willoughby, 2014

Wednesday, September 26, 2018

This Saturday, 10 to 6, find me selling at Table 32 for our 5th Annual Etsy: Made in Canada show! This year we have 130 fabulous handmade artists and artisans selling in the airy and history MaRS Discovery District Atrium. I will have a selection of my linocut prints and stuffed toys, with natural history, science prints, and hints of magic! This is always a great show and I hope you'll come join us. Stop by and say hello!

Thursday, August 9, 2018

Today would have been Mary Golda Ross' 110 birthday. Known as Gold to her family, Mary Golda Ross (1908-2008) was a mathematician, aeronautical engineer, philanthropist and Cherokee “hidden figure” of the space race. Great-great-granddaughter of Chief John Ross, longest-serving chief of the Cherokee Nation who was forced to lead his people on the long march known as Trail of Tears, Ross attributed her success in math to the Cherokee tradition of encouraging equal education for boys and girls. She went to Northeastern State Teacher’s College in Tahlequah, Oklahoma and earned a bachelor’s in math by the time she was 20. She taught science and math in rural schools through the Depression then got her Master’s at the University of Colorado, taking the opportunity to also take as many astronomy classes as she could. She aimed to put her education to work to try to help Indigenous people by working as a statistician with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, until she was reassigned as an advisor to girls at the Santa Fe Indian School. When WWII broke out her father suggested she find a technical job in California. Lockheed Martin hired her as mathematician in 1942, troubleshooting the P-38 Lighting fighter plane (as shown). She knew already that her interest was in interplanetary flight, but didn’t mention it in 1942 for fear that her credibility would be questioned. As it turned out, she was indeed farsighted. After the war Lockheed Martin sent her to UCLA to study engineering and celestial mechanics. She was one of the 40 engineers selected to start Skunk Works, their Advanced Development Program, an in-house top-secret think tank. She was the only woman and only Indigenous person and much of her work there remains classified! The engineers were working long hours, often to 11 pm at night, during the rush of the Space Race. Some of her work included feasibility studies of ballistic missile and other defense systems. More interesting to me is her work on the pressure from ocean surface waves would effect submarine-launched vehicles; the effect of pressure from ocean surface waves on the seafloor was central to my own doctoral research. She worked on preliminary design concepts for interplanetary travel, crewed and uncrewed space flights and the earliest plans for orbiting satellites. She worked on the Agena rocket, so important to the Apollo moon mission (shown in my portrait), the Polaris reentry vehicle and was an author of the NASA Flight Handbook Vol. III about flight to Mars and Venus.

After retiring in 1973, she devoted her time to recruiting and mentoring women and Indigenous people to engineering. At 96 she participated in the opening ceremony for the National Museum of the American Indian, wearing her first traditional Cherokee dress made by her niece, and she left the museum $400,000 upon her death.

Wednesday, July 4, 2018

This is a linocut portrait of Margaret Lucas Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1623 – 1673), 17th-century English aristocrat, philosopher, poet, scientist, fiction-writer, and playwright shown with her imaginary world from her strange science fiction novel 'The Blazing World' which she appended to her scientific treatise 'Observations upon Experimental Philosophy'. Cavendish is an odd addition to my collection of portraits of scientists, as a self-taught, die-hard royalist aristocrat, and firm anti-empiricist, but her publications on gender, power, manners, scientific method, and philosophy cannot be ignored. She wrote six books on Natural Philosophy and was the first woman admitted to a meeting of the Royal Society, and as such was a part of the contemporary world of science. Plus, this delightfully eccentric woman combined her natural philosophy with science fiction, and wrote herself into the story. The lino block portrait is handprinted on Japanese kozo (or mulberry paper) 11" x 14" with some collaged washi papers.

Margaret was born the youngest of eight children of Thomas Lucas, a wealthy aristocrat and royalist who died when she was two. She spent a lot of time with her siblings and had no real education, though she had access to scholarly libraries and she began writing at a young age, at a time when this was considered quite unusual for a woman. She also learned from her brother John, a philosopher and natural philosopher and founding member of the Royal Society. Margaret was unusual in many ways and full of contradictions. She was bashful yet flirtatious, accused of using speech full of 'oaths and obscenity' yet concerned about decorum and propriety, fame-seeking and ambitious, society phenomenon considered to bold for a woman, proto-feminist yet an "arch-conservative" monarchist. In 1641, the royalist Lucas family were attacked by the Puritan neighbours and fled to Oxford where King Charles I held his court. Left without a dowry, she convinced her mother and Elizabeth Leighton Lucas to let her become one of Queen's Ladies-in-Waiting (to Queen Henrietta Maria the Catholic wife of the soon to be executed King Charles I, known at the time as 'Queen Mary') in 1643 and then accompanied her upon her exile to France in 1644 (during the First English Civil War). This was a move she regretted. She was too shy to speak much and was mistaken for a fool, but she preferred this to risking being found wanton or rude. She suffered from what she called melancholia. She wanted to quit but her mother convinced her this would be disgraceful and to stay for two years, until such time as she married William Cavendish, then Marquis of Newcastle, later named Duke. A widower 30 years her senior, William Cavendish seems to have been a remarkably good match for her, and both of them wrote about their love for and pride in the other. William reportedly liked her bashfulness and became her writing tutor, supported her writing, paid for her work to be published and defended her when contemporaries doubted her authorship. He was her great supporter and defender, a patron of the arts and brother to noted scholar Charles Cavendish. Margaret was unable to conceive a child (though William had two sons from his first marriage). Without children or an estate, Margaret filled her time writing. Margaret's most successful publication was her biography of her husband, The Life of the Thrice Noble, High and Puissant Prince William Cavendishe.

As a 'royalist delinquent' (a Royalist who fought against Parliament during the English Civil War) her husband's estate was sequestered by parliament and was to be sold. She tried returning to England with her brother-in-law to benefit from the sale, but was denied and returned to France after a year and a half to be with her husband. In 1660, with the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy, Margaret and William were able to return to England and ultimately settled in Welbeck, where Margaret worked on publishing her writing and increasing her knowledge and skills.

At a time when women published anonymously, if at all, Cavendish published over a dozen works in her own name. She choose to reinvent herself through fashion, seeking to be and look unique arguing that clothes oppressed women. She wrote a memoir to ensure later generations would have a true account of her lineage and life and in her bid to achieve everlasting fame. She wrote about natural philosophy, atoms, nature personified, macro and microcosms, other worlds, death, battle, hunting, love, honour, employing poetry, prose, epistles and plays. She was one of the earliest advocates for animals and opponents of animal testing. Her writing was defensive, excusing her errors as due to her youth and ignorance, imploring detractors to keep silence, and nonetheless asking that if her writing was successful that she benefit and gain fame for it. Between her being a female author, woman engaged with science, her eccentricities and theatrical dress-sense, she was nicknamed "Mad Marge" by contemporaries, but along with her detractors, she had her supporters and she was taken seriously enough to be the first woman invited to attend meeting of the Royal Society.

In 1666 she wrote Observations upon Experimental Philosophy. Philosophically, she rejected Aristotle and favoured the Stoics. She argued against Cartesian dualism. She had no education in science or natural philosophy, though her brother was a founder of the Royal Society, her interest was supported by her husband and brother-in-law, and she socialized with her husband's tutor Thomas Hobbes. Like Hobbes, she rejected the idea of incorporeal souls. She thought minds are material and matter could think. Unlike Hobbes, she envisioned a vitalistic nor mechanistic world. While in France they gathered an intellectual circle (known as the Cavendish or Newcastle circle) which included English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, Henry More, and natural philosopher Kenelm Digby and Walter Charleton, and French philosophers and mathematician René Descartes, Pierre Gassendiand Marin Mersenne.This circle in turn was in communication with fellow intellectuals throughout Europe. She herself corresponded with physicist Christiaan Huygens, philosopher and Joseph Glanvill and botanist John Evelyn. She chose to engage with and write about the science and scientists of her time to the best of her abilities. She argued strongly for the use of clear and plain English when writing about science and complained that natural philosophy contained difficult words and unfamiliar expressions. She chose to avoid such writing in her desire to communicate clearly and broadly. Appended to this work was one of the earliest science fiction novels, a sort of imaginative complement to the science: The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World, better known as The Blazing World, a fantasy, utopian satire.

The story tells of a young woman from the Kingdom of Esfi, who is kinapped by pirates and then escapes to another world via a portal at the North Pole. This other world is called the Blazing World and is inhabited by animal-people (bird-men, fish-men, fox-men, bear-men, ape-men, ant-men, fly-men, worm-men, louse-me and more) obsessed with telescopes and microscopes, a means by which Cavendish satirizes the Royal Society and the work of Robert Hooke (who had recently published his Micrographia). The lady becomes the Empress by marriage there. As Empress she grows frustrated with their use of telescopes since they seem to only be a cause of arguments and first bans them but relents and orders them to keep them in their schools, rather than introduce any "disturbances in State, or Government." She is likewise underwhelmed by their microscopic observations and considers these technological tools "false informers". The Empress seeks a scribe to read her write her own religious texts. She rejects famous philosophers Aristotle, Pythagoras, Plato, Galileo or Hobbes, who would be too “self-conceited” to agree and develops a telepathic relationship mediated by spirits with none other than... Margaret Cavendish! The Duchess and Empress become platonic lovers and travel to each other's worlds. Like later science fiction, the Blazing World includes some imagined technology and science which can appear far-sighted in hindsight, like the air-powered engines, flying machines, elaborate submarines (which could remotely measure ocean depth) or the concept of an infinite universe. But, it also contains common contemporary misconceptions like the idea that insects are spontaneously generated or that alchemy might work. The work also features without judgment homosexuality, androgyny and polyamory. My print shows the Empress (the only personnage in the Blazing World allowed to wear gold) surrounded by the fish, ape, birds, bears, worm, and fly-men scholars, complete with telescope, microscope and a louse-man in a submarine.

She challenged the idea of man's dominion over nature and argued that animals possessed intelligence. She employed the sceptical tools of science to attack natural philosophy and question its methods as well as argue for recognition of women's intellectual capacity. She attacked the empirical methods of Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle and once referred to such experimentalists as “Boys that play with watry Bubbles.” She attacked Descartes' flawed vortex theory. She attacked male-dominated science in general. She conceived that shape plays a role in the reaction of atoms - an idea more familiar to modern-day scientists than her contemporaries (though her version of atomic theory also combined some medieval ideas about the elements). She made publications on the contemporary concepts of atomic theory, magnetism and heat. She also combined speculation and fantasy with some of her confused ideas about natural philosophy, but her output was no more muddled than that of male contemporaries considered scientific prodigies. Unlike her contemporaries, her ideas about atoms had no requirement for God or theology to explain the world, and in fact her ideas of infinite populated words both without and within (for instance on a lady's earring) were a bit dangerous in her time. Though I am an experimentalist and fan of Hooke and her think her radical scepticism is misplaced, I believe that questioning the limits of empirical methods and knowledge is of the utmost importance.

Amongst some less charitable things, Virginia Wolf wrote of Cavendish, "One cannot help following the lure of her erratic and lovable personality as it meanders and twinkles through page after page. There is something noble and Quixotic and high-spirited, as well as crack-brained and bird-witted, about her. Her simplicity is so open; her intelligence so active; her sympathy with fairies and animals so true and tender. She has the freakishness of an elf, the irresponsibility of some non-human creature, its heartlessness, and its charm."

More recently, Margaret Cavendish has been studied as an early feminist, though her pleas for the need for education of women and defense of their abilities is combined with a great deal of criticism of other women. As she inserted herself into The Blazing World, she's also delightfully being called the original Mary Sue.

Margaret Cavendish died suddenly on 15 December 1673 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Before his death, two years later, her devoted husband gathered all the poems he had written in her honour and letters to celebrate her and published them as Letters and Poems in Honour of the Incomparable Princess, Margaret, Dutchess of Newcastle. In her own words, in the introduction of The Blazing World, she wrote, "That though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second; yet I
will endeavour to be, Margaret the First: and, though I have neither
Power, Time, nor Occasion, to be a great Conqueror, like Alexander, or
Caesar; yet, rather than not be Mistress of a World, since Fortune and
the Fates would give me none, I have made One of my own."